In The Faces Of Thomas Jefferson America Finds Its Selves

February 17, 1997|By Achy Obejas, Tribune Staff Writer.

He's a man for the '90s--brilliant and powerful, a charming, cunning chameleon who can be all things to all people at any given time.

William Jefferson Clinton? No. Consider instead Thomas Jefferson, the third president. More than 200 years after Jefferson attempted a quiet and early retirement to his beloved estate Monticello near Charlottesville, Va., one of the most famous--right up there with Washington and Franklin--American founding fathers is the focus of increased attention from everyone from academics to moviemakers and, of course politicians.

"How can you not like a guy who says all men are created equal and have inalienable rights such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?" asked Stephen G. Smith, editor of the National Journal, a Washington, D.C.-based magazine focusing on politics. "That last phrase couldn't capture the zeitgeist of 1997 better."

He's the subject of Ken Burns' upcoming documentary; was played by Nick Nolte on screen in 1995's "Jefferson in Paris"; the topic of so many books--17 in 1993 alone, the 250th anniversary of his birth--that it now takes two volumes to print the complete Jefferson bibliography.

The Jefferson image on the World Wide Web page dedicated to him (actually, he pops up in at least 80 others) is almost god-like. More than half a million people visit Monticello every year. The Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., the site of several special private events last year, experienced a leap to 750,922 visitors from 591,305 the year before.

"What's remarkable is that he still inspires so much strong feeling," said Peter Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation professor of history at the University of Virginia, a school Jefferson founded and for which he designed the campus. "When talking about Jefferson, people feel compelled to hold forth on the state of American culture. We insist there's a legacy, whether we agree with it or not."

"He embodies a general spirit of optimism, the things other people say about us as Americans," explained Annette Gordon-Reed, author of "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy" (University Press of Virginia), which purports to document the long-rumored liaison between Jefferson and one of his slave women. "He embodies the capacity to endlessly reinvent ourselves, to be curious about everything. Jefferson is America as an innocent."

But not all the talk about Jefferson is so adoring. "He inspires a thumbs up, thumbs down feeling," explained Onuf. "We historians are supposed to deal with desiccated material that's not of interest to anybody, but Jefferson interests everybody."

Some revere him as one of the creators of the world's longest-running experiment in democracy, others vilify him for what they claim is hypocrisy, particularly on matters dealing with race.

His mind and character seem tantalizingly impossible to fully grasp. Historian Merrill Peterson, who has done groundbreaking scholarship on Jefferson and is considered by many the best biographer he ever had, confessed after 30 years of studying him that "Jefferson remains for me, finally, an impenetrable man."

The reason, according to Smith, is that Jefferson left plenty of evidence behind that could be interpreted in a variety of ways. "He has a modern complexity, which is to say, he grappled with all sorts of contradictions," explained Smith. "He's particularly relevant at a time when party lines are blurring. A guy with gauzy lines captures the ambiguity we all feel about difficult issues."

All sides of an issue

According to "American Sphinx" (Knopf), a new biography that focuses on Jefferson's character, the third president had a remarkable capacity for multiple points of view--all of them held earnestly because of an equally formidable power of denial.

"He didn't have a tortured mind," claims the book's author, Joseph Ellis, a history professor at Mt. Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass. "He utterly believed whatever he said whenever he said it; he could pass a lie detector test."

According to Ellis, that's why Jefferson could on one hand try to insert a clause to outlaw slavery in the Declaration of Independence while, on the other, own more than 200 slaves at Monticello. Or how he could vote in favor of a boycott of English goods, then order a piano from the mother country--promising to leave it in storage until the boycott was over.

"Jefferson was a very powerful figure to Southern secessionists as well as Northern abolitionists," said Smith. "He was a powerful symbol to (the) robber baron class as well as a populist figure. Both Hoover and FDR claimed him as a guide for the way they handled the economic problems of the 1930s."